So, this may please a lot of you, last blog post for a while, off to the rural hinterland of France where Pigeons seem to be the only means of getting a message back to Blighty, throwing all my faith into Orange.fr to get a line into the Farmhouse and connect me back up to the WWW or I'll be seeking out some freebie wifi hotspots and chomping down hard on their bandwidth..... so what is there to say, to those who met me...ooops sorry, to those who didn't meet me, you got off lightly and for those of you yet to meet me, well I'd be checking on your diary for alternative arrangments.... lets stay chummy over the t'interweb, my avatar will always be this go getting , curly haired lithe minx, so a chance meeting in the flesh would probably be looked on as something of a great dissapointment, I for one, can't wait to hear me do a French version of a Photoshop video tutorial, c'est magnifique, le photographie est enorme et le singe sur l'arbre... well along those lines, should be good. Tonight I attack the furniture with power tools, those that survive will be hustled onto a big blue van that will (hopefully) rendezvous with us on the other side of the Channel.Time has run out on all the photographic project work I wanted to get through,,,so my Manchester Mono essay will be finished after I come back in August...or even December..time not being my best friend at the moment all the other stuff will morph into various parts of France and Europe..apparently it's not going to be all work and no play...work being the digging, clearing, painting and titivating of maison Max not the hand crafted jewels of photography plucked from the sonorous landscape of the Parc D'Armorique...that being my new home. ( I've had some cider in the sunshine...please allow some leeway in this fluff) So if you catch sight of a Pigeon, that unlike it's Manchester counterpart, bloated from feasting on old kebabs and regurgitated Chinese, but fed a diet of artichoke hearts and Gallettes, flapping towards you, don't do as the French do and reach for the shotgun, let it land and rest awhile, there may be a message from some foreign shore strapped to it's well toned leg..and that message will most likely be from me....until then

Bon Journee mes enfants...once more unto the Barricades... I kiss you on all your cheeks XXXX

Thought the BBC said we were set for a dose of Hot weather?.... I'll do a breakdown on settings for doing the timelapse stuff next week, just another busy day down here in the bunker. Just had another set of images optioned for book covers very similar to these but without the texture work...

New work flow seems to be paying some dividends as Getty, Alamy and Trevillion are accepting everything I chuck in their direction, just get out there guys and flog some, I've got this Lotus eating, grape peeling, flunkied and aspirational life style over in France to immerse myself into...oh hang on ..I should have said painting, decorating, digging and fixer uppering... and then put 'in ten years time...' in front of Lotus eating... I'm on the Red Hot Java Lava today and my heart is bouncing around in my chest like an Alien wannabee but appears to be providing the requisite boost to my mental faculties.Right lots of shopping , picking stuff up, paying stuff in and new specs to fit on my wonky conk and cock eyed ears...it's driven many an opthalmic assistant straight to the iso propyl alcohol over the decades. Until the next time or if this weather persists,I'll see you on Noahs Ark , you'll find me in the bowels of the vessel shovelling more guano like this.

In the past, without engaging my brain and just flopping into it, I've had a dabble with time lapse. Okay, I added an ND filter to drag the shutter and got some spectacularly meh! results...and they were experimental...no thought of what file size I was going to shoot, how I would render things ..in fact a massive stumble through things I really should have brought my brains A game to.So as I'm off to an area of so much coast and unspoilt landscape in Brittany I thought it was best if I hunkered down, got the thought processes into first gear and had a go at Time lapse....and what better place to start than on the wind ravaged crests of the Pennines up at Meltham on the badlands border between West Yorks and Manchester. Sometimes you can have a chat with Mother Nature and tell her 'Go on, do your worst...' Well she did...horizontal rain in bursts that stung, up here there is no real cover unless you do what the sheep do and that's hide behind a stone wall. So I got a few sequences, learned a lot about intervals and how much a tripod can move in a howling gale, enough to make the time lapse look like it's shivering...not far from the truth there. So here is one I shot close to the Moors Murder memorial hidden away near the road into Holmfirth... Frame rate 24 fps, one shot every 2 seconds Nikon D700 and the 20mm f2.8.... exported from LR5 as 2000 pix max files and panned + rendered in Photoshop CC. Click on the enlarge button and see the rain coming in...

Only fifteen seconds but I kept looking over my shoulder to the West and hoped the image run would be over before the downpour started...just...more to work on now...... below the plaque...

Hello...or is it Bonjour... mai oui....One way ticket to Europe purchased...and so within the next 2 weeks I will not only have left England but left Manchester and all that this old place has given me since those crazy days of the late '70's when I rocked up into Chorlton on my Suzuki A100 and threw myself into a whirl of discovery of this old sprawling metrolandFirst thing I did was take Ronnie the Bronica, my ever present S2a, out for a wander through the heart of town, the decay of the canal infrastructure, the emptiness of Manchester. come 7 o'clock and the City centre would be dead as a door nail, no bijou riverside apartments or city centre high rises in those days....unike now of course. At this point you might assume that I would be inserting examples of gritty and grimy imagery shot on FP3 and printed out on my Durst 601 on grade 3 Ilford..alas...cellars and dribbling washing machines located just above your tea chest full of negs and prints don't really make a good mix, one day I will peel everything apart..but not on this day.So in many ways Manchester has been good to me over the decades and I got to thinking that before I go I'd like to echo what I did when I first moved here, that's go out, discover the old place again and put together a little project, mono , no tricks, straight shooting style. So I am....I'm not really looking for a bright sunny day...it's Manchester, you've come to the wrong place if you want that... but I am going to use the infra structure that now exists and instead of Ronnie the Bronica (My shutter cannae take it captain...) I'll be shooting it with the rather marvellous 41mpix monster that is the Nokia 1020...yes ...a phone...get over it..., if you are that regular reader of this flannel then you'll know it's all about the shooter...not what you shoot with.... So, you'll all be the first to know, missives will be sent by pigeon and social media to those who need to know, too late to unfriend and unsubscribe, I know who you are and which part of the interweb you live on.This will be more Love Story than special FX loaded block buster, but it will be referenced to those gritty Black and Whites of the 70's and also be the start of my image making on continental Europe